• Okay, I have no problem admitting I’m naïve on the subject. If I guessed wrong, though, what is addiction about? It’s hard for me to imagine getting addicted to something you aren’t likely to use and don’t like.

    Sure, I can see people changing their mind about something once they’re already addicted, but that’s not the same thing.

    • You can decide to use something because you like it and have a positive value for you, and then end up abusing that same things because of addiction.

      Facebook and other social media actively engineer their service to exploit our natural brain functioning in order to became addictive. On top of that, they also give well designed services which can be useful and fun to use. People decide to use those services because of that and ends up becoming addicted and using them for a lot more time. This has nothing to do with good design.

      It’s like with smoking: people can find it a legitimate pleasure because of the taste, the social meanings and the gesture, but you ends up being addicted because of the nicotine, not because it’s a pleasure per-se.

    • This is an oversimplification, but do you think drugs don’t feel fucking fantastic? Like, how would they hook you if there wasn’t something about them on the first dose? Facebook does it by dopamine hits and confirmation bias, but the pathways are not far off.